Liz Murray: Expectancy

        If one has no expectancy, even though the tasks are valued, it is hard for him/her to achieve the goal. Expectancy is about the possibility of an event in personal prediction, and self-efficacy plays an essential role. Self-efficacy is an individual’s perception of his/her capacity of organizing and arranging skills to cope with different situations, and he/she expects positive outcomes will appear after their actions. In other words, self-efficacy not only demonstrates one’s confidence in abilities but also needs to represent abilities in various circumstances and expect desired results. From Liz Murray’s life experiences, her self-efficacy runs through the whole story. 

"No, I'll take it."

When Liz was in elementary school, she did not go to school very often, not because she did not like school, but because the people in school made her feel sad. The few times she went to school was for the promotion exam. The teacher did not expect her to take the exam and was going to take the test away from her; however, Liz said, “No, I will take it.” When the teacher doubted if she had the ability to take the test since she was only in school three times a week, Liz said, “I’ll take it. It doesn’t look that hard.” Liz showed her confidence of her competence, and when the teacher doubted her abilities, she was firm that she was able to take the test. She also expected that she could pass the test because that was the reason she was there, which means she believed that she could obtain her desired goal. 

"No, I'm gonna live."

After Liz’s mother’s death, she went back to school again. Since she missed many school days before, and she was older than her classmates, she decided to finish the four-year program in two years, which required her to take ten classes a semester. Her professor commented her decision as “You’ll kill yourself,” and Liz firmly responded to him, “No, I’m gonna live.” This scene is my favorite in the whole movie. I watched this movie eleven years ago, and this scene is the only one I could remember without watching again. The firmness of her expression and her words of “No, I’m gonna live” showed me how self-efficacy played in her life. Parts of the reason Liz had such a high self-efficacy were her personal experiences and the messages from her parents and the people surrounding her. Her personal experiences came from her successful experiences of passing the elementary promotion exam without going to school a lot, which confirmed her self-learning ability. Throughout her life, her mother showed her the importance of learning and encouraged her to continue studying. Her father also revealed his belief in her ability to learn, and Liz’s neighbor Eva supported her learning since she was young. All those people formed Liz’s self-efficacy and encouraged her to believe that she could do this hard work, and she was certain she could make it and attain her goal. 

"I had to believe there were roads would rise up for me."

Even though life had been tough to Liz, she had never lost her hope in life. Hope is found when a person has the motivation to work toward her goal and knows multiple ways to achieve the goal. The first part of hope is the high agency, which demonstrates one’s confidence in her competence, and it is similar to self-efficacy. The second part of hope is having clear and multiple pathways to achieve the goal. Since Liz chose to accelerate the four-year program to two years, she worked hard toward her goal because she wanted to graduate early. She found multiples ways to achieve her goal, such as choosing ten classes a semester, being the first coming and the last leaving person, using the time on the subway to study, and reading while doing her part-time job. When she visited Harvard, she was amazed by the people at Harvard and the rich studying environment. When her professor told her that the people at Harvard were just people, she responded, “Not people like me.” At that moment, she was at a low agency point and experiencing low cognitive hope. Fortunately, she asked herself later, “Why not people like me?” She regained her agency and decided to become a part of well-educated people. She looked for different opportunities to help her afford the tuition there, and that was how she found the New York Times scholarship, which later helped her pay off all the tuition. Throughout her story, it showed that no matter how the circumstances changed, Liz always held the cognitive hope that she was motivated to learn, and once she decided on her goal, she sought every pathway to accomplish it.